The seventeen who went with them to Aizu

On the third day of the intercalary fourth month of 1868 Oguri Tadamasa called his retainers and the village officials together at his lodging in Tōzenji. His heir Matakichi had left the day before for the commander's camp at Takasaki, and the troops of the three domains were closing on the village. At that gathering Oguri settled the arrangements for getting his mother Kuniko and his wife Michiko away.

The protection of my family is a great charge. I wish to entrust it to Nakajima Sanzaemon. He is well trusted by the villagers, the young men especially, and he is steady in courage and has nerve

Sanzaemon was the head of a sake-brewing house at the Gonda station, under the trade name Yamasan, and had served as a group head and as a representative of the peasants; he was fifty-three. Of the travel money Oguri took from his strongbox, eight hundred ryō passed into this man's hands. For the attendant on the pregnant Michiko, Sanzaemon chose his own daughter Sai, seventeen — a choice made so that she could stand in for the lady if the worst came.

Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki's Oguri Kōzukenosuke names the following seventeen.

Two women servants are also recorded as having gone with them. It was Koitabashi Ryōhei's Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki that supplied surnames to these people known only by a given name. By that book, Keisuke was Hagiwara Keisuke of Nagai; Ryūsaku, Satō Ryūsaku of Kodaka; Genchū, Tsukakoshi Genchū of Oshidaira; Tomikichi, Tsukakoshi Tomigorō; Torakichi, Ōi Torakichi; and Unosuke, Unokichi of Maemura. The place of deputy leader was taken by Nakazawa Kankichi (forty-six, elder brother of Ōi Isojūrō, who was beheaded with Oguri), and the guide was Ikeda Denzaburō (twenty-three), who knew the country from Agatsuma through to Shinshū. The “stone of benevolence and duty together” at Tōzenji carries the names of the twenty who joined the escort and of the villagers who supported the undertaking.

All of them were young men Oguri had trained as infantry. From before 1865 Oguri had had the headman Satō Tōshichi pick a few of the village's sons each year and lodge them at the residence at Surugadai in Edo. By day they worked about the house; by night Tsukamoto Masahiko and others taught them elementary mathematics and English. As the shogunate's military reform went forward, they received French-style drill as they were, as “the Oguri house infantry”. It was these men who drove off the attack from Sannokura in the third month. Young men of the village who had been tilling fields two months before were entrusted with the family of a former commissioner of finance of the shogunate.

The party left Tōzenji within the third and moved to the house of Ikeda Tamikichi at Uenokubo, then to Kamezawa. Before dawn on the sixth day of the intercalary fourth month the troops sent against him entered the village. Sanzaemon disguised himself as a farmer, got in among the labourers, and saw his lord beheaded at the riverbed at Mizunuma. Then he ran back to the hiding place and made for the village of Iriyama in Agatsuma district by side roads.

On the edge of the village at Yatake the party divided in two: twenty-odd people moving in a body would draw notice. Michiko had Sanzaemon, Satō Ginjūrō, Nakazawa Tōtarō, Satō Ryūsaku and Tsukakoshi Genchū with her, and went over the shortest way, the Sugao pass, to Wakōbara. His mother Kuniko (sixty) and Matakichi's betrothed, Kusaka Masa (fourteen), guarded by Ikeda Denzaburō, Tsukakoshi Tomigorō, Hagiwara Goheiji and others, with Nakajima Sai, went round by the Manki pass through Kariyado, Imai and Hikage, a detour of some ten ri.

They reached the village of Hiroike about ten in the morning of the next day, having walked all night. They borrowed horses at the house of the headman Yamamoto Ichibei and went on to Wakōbara, four ri further. Ichibei's daughter-in-law, who was picking mulberry leaves, told for years afterwards of “one fine lady who came walking with difficulty, leaning as if on a samurai”.

The two parties met at Wakōbara and went by Naganohara, the hot spring at Wayama and Akiyama in Echigo to Tōkamachi. There, however, the travel money ran out. Sanzaemon ordered Tsukakoshi Fusatarō and Nakazawa Kankichi back to Gonda to raise three hundred ryō. The two went back along the Shinshū road dressed as pilgrims to Zenkōji, but were seized by retainers of the Matsushiro domain at the Shibu station and held three days, and when they reached the village no answer about the money could be had.

After waiting five days the party joined Kuniko's group at the village of Horinouchi and came out at Niigata — the place where Oguri's father Tadataka had served as commissioner. When they told their circumstances to Akizuki Shinjirō, the officer in charge at the encampment at Suibara in Kanbara district, three palanquins and a horse came from Aizu to fetch them. At Aizu, through the arrangement of the senior retainer Ishizawa Tanomo, they took shelter at the residence of the domain retainer Yokoyama Chikara. Kuniko, the child he left, was born during the siege that followed.

The young men did not go back to the village when their charge was done. On the fourteenth day of the intercalary fourth month about ten of them, led by Satō Ginjūrō, left Hanrikuchi and called on Machino Gennosuke, the district commissioner, at the Aizu encampment at Asakai. They joined the Seishi company attached to the fourth Suzaku samurai company, made up of men from outside the Aizu domain, and fought at the Mikuni pass and at Daihannyazaka.

Tsukakoshi Tomigorō (twenty-three) was shot through the chest at the end of the eighth month at the ferry crossing at Issao along the Aga River, now Takasato in Kitakata. Aizu Boshin Senshi (a history of the Aizu campaign of 1868) records that “Tomikichi was a retainer of Oguri Kōzukenosuke Tadamasa, a hereditary servant of the house of Tokugawa”. Satō Ginjūrō (twenty-one) fell in the ninth month in the fighting at Kumakura. He was the marksman of whom Oguri had written in his diary after the fighting at Gonda in the third month: “in today's fight the infantryman Ginjūrō fought with great spirit and cut down four men in the end”. His grave remains in the common graveyard of Kōmyōji at Kumakura in Kitakata, cut with the words “grave of Satō Ginjūrō Shin'ichi, of the province of Kōzuke”.

In the spring of 1869 the party left Aizu. Arriving in Edo by river boat, they found that the house of Tokugawa had already moved to Shizuoka. Sanzaemon went with them as far as Shizuoka and settled the matter of having Matakichi's younger brother succeed to the house of Oguri for the time being. Only with the restoring of his master's house was the charge entrusted to him finished.

Back in the village, Sanzaemon and the others were summoned by the Maebashi domain office, which was then keeping order in the district. The officer who heard their account declared as follows.

You are not Oguri's retainers but no more than the village officials and peasants of his holding; yet the sincerity with which you staked your lives and exerted yourselves for your landlord is something that even hereditary retainers who have eaten his stipend for generations fall far short of

They were then ordered to “change the surname Nakajima and call yourselves Honda”, and Sanzaemon took the name Honda Sanpeiji. When they got back to the village their condition was like that of beggars, it is handed down. With no rest, Sanpeiji set out for Tatebayashi to take back his lord's head.

Among the names on the list is Tamikichi: Ikeda Tamikichi, the “paper merchant” of Uenokubo. His daughter Kayo was betrothed to Ikeda Denzaburō, who served as guide. Past ninety, Kayo left an account of what she had seen of the Oguri household at Gonda. The figure of the lady, and the number of the women about the house, come down to us today through her memory. Kayo was seventeen when her father and her betrothed set out for Aizu.

Very little is known of their later lives. Even so, simply because their names survive, these people turn back from a party of “twenty-odd villagers” into one person and another.

Sources: Ōtsubo Sadakata and Hozumi Odoroki, Oguri Kōzukenosuke, Oguri Kōzukenosuke o Shinobu Kai, 1975 (the forms of the names follow that book); Koitabashi Ryōhei, Oguri Kōzukenosuke Ichizoku no Higeki: Oguri Fujin-ra Dasshutsu Senkō, Aizu e no Michi (the tragedy of the Oguri family: the escape and secret journey of Lady Oguri and the others, the road to Aizu), Asao-sha; Hayakawa Keison, “Lady Oguri's escape from Gonda and the house of Oguri afterwards” (Jōmō oyobi Jōmōjin, January 1923, printed in Kurabuchi Mura-shi); the journal Tatsunami.

→ The flight of his wife Michiko — the road to Aizu　／　Kuniko, “the only blood of the house of Oguri”, born at Aizu　／　The retainers who died on the Karasu River　／　The taking back of the head